Currently browsing posts about: Food

The industry-funded International Food Information Council has just announced the release of it 12th annual Food and Health Survey. This asks people what they think about a wide range of consumer issues related to food and nutrition.

The report is full of interesting tidbits about how Americans think about food issues.

Or this one:

This one is impressive:

And here’s my favorite:

Lots of interesting material here, all to be taken with some degree of caution since the data come from an online survey taking 22 minutes to complete.

Alan Warde. The Practice of Eating. Polity, 2016.

This is a sociologist’s attempt to establish a theory of food consumption. Advances in theory, he says, have been limited for three reasons:

First, eating has been looked at as a series of practical problems, as a terrain of crises. Second, the topic has been dealt with in multidisciplinary contexts where theoretical synthesis has had low priority. Third, consumption remains subordinated to concern about production.

This book makes up for those deficiencies and will be greatly appreciated by graduate students of sociology, food studies, and other academic disciplines.

Brazil has just released the final version of its Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian population in English as well as in Portuguese (I wrote about the draft version in an earlier post).

As explained in the press release (also in English), the guidelines include ten steps to healthy diets:

Make natural or minimally processed foods the basis of your diet

Use oils, fats, salt, and sugar in small amounts when seasoning and cooking natural or minimally processed foods and to create culinary preparations

Limit consumption of processed foods

Avoid consumption of ultra-processed products

Eat regularly and carefully in appropriate environments and, whenever possible, in company

Shop in places that offer a variety of natural or minimally processed foods

Develop, exercise and share culinary skills

Plan your time to make food and eating important in your life

Out of home, prefer places that serve freshly made meals

Be wary of food advertising and marketing

Traditionally, families based their diets on natural and minimally processed foods. The guidelines are based on the actual, traditional dietary patterns of a substantial proportion of the Brazilian population of all ages and classes throughout the country.

Carlos Monteiro, the Brazilian nutrition professor listed as the technical formulator of the guidelines, was in Washington DC last week to speak at a conference on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines. Monteiro’s speech is here. Tweets sent during the meeting are here.

If you happen to be in Switzerland and anywhere near Lake Geneva, Nestlé’s Alimentarium in Vevey has a special display of quirky collections: sardine cans, sugar cubes, and fruit wrappers, for example. You can find it easily from its fork stuck into Lake Geneva.

Food exhibits seem to be the current Big Thing. I’m trying to take advantage of them while they are around. You too?

Today is the official release date for Food, Inc., the latest film about our food production system and its discontents. This one has generated tons of interest, and for good reason (I’ve seen it twice). For one thing, it is star-studded: Eric Schlosser! Michael Pollan! For another, it takes a hard look at the less savory aspects of industrial food production for a purpose: to make you think before you eat.

one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” [is]an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.